


virtues are as virtues be

by jibrailis



Category: Angel Sanctuary
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-05-17
Updated: 2010-05-17
Packaged: 2017-10-09 13:05:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,672
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/87813
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jibrailis/pseuds/jibrailis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"God is dead, Heaven is torn, and then there's you and me. We're all learning how to do this again," she says.</p>
            </blockquote>





	virtues are as virtues be

He taunts her, sometimes.

"You're like a sister to me," he says, slipping through her rooms, his voice like the silver-gold shadow of the Tree of Life. She watches him warily, standing before her mirror with her hair half uncurled from its knot. This way, she is vulnerable. She is certain that is why he chose this moment exactly to come into her rooms. She is also certain that he has something he feels he must tell her. It is not often that he breaches her privacy. They had an agreement from the first day she started working for him: she is not one of his strumpets. She will not open and close on his whims.

That is why when he comes to her rooms, the alternative is to face something fierce and terrible. Over the years, these have been some of the reasons: Lucifer's rebellion, Michael's defeat, Alexiel. For each time he has sought her in the middle of the night, she has a memory as unyielding as her knuckle bones.

But she should have remembered. He taunts her sometimes.

"A sister?" Barbiel replies lightly. She puts on the smile he expects from her, brisk and friendly, consummately professional. She shows none of her fangs – Raphael does not want to see women with fangs. "If that is how you see me, then it must be true."

Raphael slides through the darkness. Eden's serpent would have taken lessons from him. "It must be," he agrees. "Why else would I feel no desire to fuck you?"

Her bones expand, and then tighten. She fixes her gaze on the mirror, looking into her the deepness of her own pupils. A byzantine pattern. "Exactly," Barbiel says. "Now you should get going, sir. Even second in commands need their sleep, you know!"

His laughter is a puff against her cheek. "Sure," he says. She listens to him leave. The door closes behind him as if it never opened at all.

In the morning, she brings him his reports, makes sure that his tea is warm, and restocks his medical supplies. He thanks her for each task. Nothing is different.

 

* * *

 

A time and times and half a time, wrote the human prophet Daniel. Yet sometimes it feels like Sevothtarte has had a grip over Heaven for even longer. Raphael is quiet and moody after his conversations with Sevotharte, one way conversations in which the Prime Minister gives orders and Raphael responds. Barbiel takes notes, because Raphael has a tendency to forget important details, but she doesn't look at the keyboard when she types. She just looks at Raphael.

He frowns when he thinks no one is watching.

It's the girl. Sara. Jibril. She of many names, and yet only one face needed to ensnare the Angel of Air.

And besides, it's a conceit of great angels to think there is ever a moment when no one is watching. They forget, often enough, how many other angels work under their command. They think they are alone, struggling valiantly for God – oceans and towers rise and fall for their stories. Barbiel has worked for several superiors by now. Compared to the others, Raphael is a calm and harmless leader. He is a skirt chaser, but he doesn't get his underlings involved in his messes. It's the reason why Barbiel accepted the transfer to the Virtues. She used to be a Power once, one of Michael's, but she got tired of washing burn marks out of her uniforms.

 

* * *

 

Barbiel never helps Raphael's girls for Raphael's sake. He doesn't know this though.

He smiles at her, sated and self-satisfied. "It's good that you convinced her to go away quietly. I needn't need her tears. What did you tell her?"

"Just this and that."

"You're like a mother. You clean up after me."

"Mother, sister, get it straight," she says, while inside she thinks about how ridiculous it is that the leader of the Virtues should need mothering. Why any of the great angels need mothering when little angels and I-Children are hunted in the slums, and angels that she grew up with and loved – Anael, Layla – are dead now. Barbiel's first superior once told her that she had a cyanide tongue and she'd need to watch it if she wanted to survive the ranks. He was right. She makes her smile for Raphael as bland as possible.

His eyes narrow. But he doesn't press it further and she goes on with her duties. Mothers and sisters are safe from Raphael. In the burning furnace, they are less than air.

 

* * *

 

"You've never slept with him? Really?" asks Jophiel when they meet up for lunch. Jophiel is still in her lab coat. She has glasses pushed carelessly up her forehead, and Barbiel loves her for that minor mundane forgetfulness.

"He's really not that impressive," she says, looking at the menu and trying to decide if she wants cake with her tea.

"Are you stupid? He's so handsome!" Jophiel heaves a sigh that Barbiel is sure is meant to mock her.

"And he's had every woman from here to Assiah without pausing to rest. He's had _you_."

Jophiel giggles. "Ah, and it was fun too."

"You're not the one who had to get the stains out the next day."

"Poor you," Jophiel says. "All that work and none of the benefits. I'm sure you could get a job with any great angel you wanted – what's keeping you with Lord Raphael then?"

"He doesn't talk too much."

"Oi, Michael. Tell me about it."

Barbiel smiles. "That's the best part, really."

 

* * *

 

No, the best part is when Raphael heals. All that power and concentration that normally goes into silly flings suddenly raises the dead or gives a dying angel another chance. She makes excuses to be present every time Raphael has a critical patient. Beneath it all – deep, deep beneath it all – is a true doctor, not only in skill but in his desire to erase pain and fix wounds. Raphael cares. That's the part that surprised Barbiel at first. Despite his bluffs, he doesn't turn anybody away. Just look at him and Michael. Raphael takes his duties seriously.

Barbiel respects that in him, one professional to another. She barely remembers a time when she wasn't a soldier. It seems like it's coded into her marrow. She flew out of Etemenanki with a gun in her hand and a holster at her hip. That's the way it seems most days. Even her current schedule of tea making and paper shuffling doesn't change the calluses on her index finger.

 

* * *

 

"I hate women," he says. "After Belial humiliated me. It was unavoidable."

No, she thinks, it wasn't.

 

* * *

 

She doesn't let Sevothtarte take her without a fight. Later, she sees the ransom photo they gave Raphael and she looks so clean in it, just a lonely angel sitting on a bed. But she has bruises, cuts, broken bones. Even her teeth are cracked from where she bit Sevothtarte's crony in the thigh.

It's still not enough to contain her.

Staying still is the hardest part. It's laughable that they actually mistake her for dead – Barbiel has always been terrible at staying still. She's an angel of motion. When she finally gets to move, to jump on her captors, it's like every cell that God put into her body is singing. Biological music drives soldierly reflexes, and she throws her whole body into it with breathless joy.

The joy carries over when she reunites with Raphael. He is tense, but she laughs and pushes him where she knows she'll get a reaction. He's left his beloved reincarnated Jibril to the sharks in order to save her. She tells him that he needs to fix his mistakes, and makes it seem like it was his idea. She waves as he drives off to his lady love.

He comes back later, moody. He sits in his office and chain smokes an entire pack of cigarettes.

"What's the matter?" she asks. "You saved her, didn't you? Got right up there and gave her back her voice. Then Lord Uriel swooped in, the Seventh Seal was broken, Messiah Boy made an appearance, the Citadel of Law blew up…there was so much chaos I could hear it from here. A hell of a rescue mission."

He shrugs nonchalantly.

"You got to be the knight in shining armour. Tell me, did she kiss you?"

His eyelids grow heavy. Behind them, his eyes are cold. He finishes another cigarette and lets the butt dangle from his long, slender fingers. He doesn't even look at her. Jophiel is right. Raphael is beautiful. He's imperious and elegant with his wind-swept intensity. And underneath the beauty there is something shameful and shambling, art in the process of decay. She used to see him before the civil war, and he looked so much happier then. Before Belial got to him, he would say, but he can't use Belial as an excuse for everything. He did this to himself.

She's just his second in command. It's none of her business what her boss dreams about on bestial nights. When he looks at his women – when he looks at Sara Mudou – she doesn't need to know what he sees.

"Love's a messed up thing, isn't it?" she asks him.

"What would you know?"

"I've got my own sordid stories. Can't be mother and sister to _everyone_, can I?" She pauses. She can't believe she's about to dispense dating advice to the most lecherous man in Heaven. "Smile for her. A real smile, that is. Lose the seduction charm. She's a frightened girl. She doesn't want to be wooed."

"Indeed," Raphael says silkily. "She's in love with her own brother."

"Her love doesn't seem to bother her."

"It's biologically wrong."

"Rape is wrong. Torture is wrong. Killing civilians is wrong." Barbiel shrugs. "You making moral judgments about consensual sex is kind of hypocritical, don't you think?"

Raphael finally, finally looks at her. Even better. He stares.

She winks.

"Point taken," he says.

There is so much she wants to tell Raphael. That Sara Mudou will never love him more than her brother. That Heaven is dying. That God is probably already dead. But then she looks at him and suspects he already knows. It's just a play they're performing now, counting down till the end. They have their roles: he the cool rogue, she the loyal retainer. Just a play.

He opens his arms. He looks like he's about to embrace her, but Raphael is not like that. He opens his arms to stretch out the knots in his muscles. Then he closes them.

Barbiel moves on. There's still paperwork to do. Always paperwork.

 

* * *

 

"I'm sick," Raphael says quietly. "I've never felt like this before."

Barbiel laughs.

The air in the room gathers like a storm.

"Oh, are you going to strike me now?" she says.

He stops manipulating the air. He looks, for a brief moment, perturbed. "No." He laughs low in his throat, the sound of skin crackling. "I tried to kiss her. She didn't want me to. So I locked her up. I thought…if she loves the Messiah that much, then I'll get rid of the Messiah. So she won't look at any man but me."

Barbiel's face changes. She moves. One, two steps. Her arm flies out. She hits him across the face.

Raphael jolts back.

"You asshole," she says.

"I know," he says.

His depression only makes her anger realer. It gives it form and shape. "I don't even have words for you sometimes. Is there any angel more selfish than you?" Her knees shake. Her hands twist in her pockets. Raphael's head is bowed, and he's bleeding onto the floor. She's hit him too hard. Maybe not hard enough.

"I want to change. Help me change," he says.

Part of her wants to. She can imagine a reformed Raphael. He would be so good and so worthy, the beauty of his face matching the beauty of his mercy. He could be her greatest creation, and she could then love him the way she's always been tempted to – it would be easy then, to let go of the anger hiding behind her smiles. It's the memory of that anger that makes her say no. She won't be one of his conquests. She won't struggle, plead, and then melt helplessly into his arms. Nothing would change then, and she can see that future too, a steady procession of sameness that stretches into the boneless sky.

 

* * *

 

It turns out they both change.

It's the first time in a long while that Barbiel has felt holy. Her mind is calm as she throws herself in front of Raphael. Her flesh, her bones, her ribcage. She's bleeding out onto the grass, so much meat now, but she can't comprehend it. It's gone to another place, perhaps where God is, and she can only feel the peace that must have been felt at the beginning of the world when she tells Sandalphon exactly what she thinks of him.

Raphael's expression – she doesn't recognize it either. They have become different people, transformed by brutality. Now they are seeing each other for the first time.

He's screaming for her.

She coughs blood into the side of her ruined arm, and dies.

 

* * *

 

An earlier memory, this one.

He came to her room, the night after he met Sara Mudou. She knew he would, had wanted it with a sweetness that disturbed her. She waited in bed, watching him as he gracefully stripped out of his clothes and slid in under the covers to join her.

"You really want this?" she asked.

"I want a lot of things," Raphael said.

She let him into her body for the first time, the night after he met Sara Mudou. She put her arms around him and held him close as he moved above and within her. He turned his cheek against her throat. He lifted her legs around his waist. Yet her heart was her own, and afterwards she wiped him from her thighs and said, "This doesn't mean I'll let you get away with avoiding your job."

"I wouldn't expect you to," he said and his fingers were lithe as he smoothed a lock of her hair.

 

* * *

 

"I guess I have you to thank for not staying dead," Barbiel says to the comatose body. She's supposed to be sitting a respectful distance away, but instead she's right up against him, her leg drawn up to her knee. "Smooth move, boss. My death wasn't the sort of the gift you return like a Chanukah reject." She hesitates. Watches Raphael's chest move up and down with his breathing. "You make things more complicated than they need to be. I've suddenly got all these questions to ask you, and you've got the bad manners not to reply."

She laughs a little.

"They tell me I need to wait. Like I'm your war widow."

She looks down at him again.

"Or maybe you're mine."

The computers beep.

Of course.

A time and times and half a time, Barbiel thinks. It must seem forever to a human, but for an angel that's nothing.

_You're like a sister to me. You're like a mother._

Sara and Setsuna Mudou are brother and sister, and yet when they look at each other, worlds catch fire.

_I have no desire to fuck you._

A lie, as it turned out. She had bruises on her hips from him.

_I want to change._

Barbiel puts her head on her forearms and rests it there. She looks at the sleeping Raphael with half lidded eyes of her own. She is thoughtful. There is time for that now. "God is dead, Heaven is torn, and then there's you and me. We're all learning how to do this again," she says, and her voice carries the weight of prophecy. She puts her hand on his knee and keeps it there. When he wakes up, they have a lot to talk about.


End file.
